As the morning wore on she felt a slow disappointment developing: it was not right, the letter, the voice in it was not John’s … not just because of the vocabulary but because of the sentiments. She did not believe that John thought in that way about such things as Beauty and Truth, Love and Death. That was not to say that he did not think of them at all, only that he did not think of them like that … ‘It’s a lot of nonsense,’ she said frowning with the effort to be honest. ‘That’s what it is, a lot of bloody nonsense.’

The truth is that Lionel, who first wrote the letter and who may think of such subjects ‘like that’ is no more honest than John in pretending to these sentiments. This is romantic falsification, the drowning of everything in noble and self-serving spin. In the way he chooses to promote his (genuine) love for Olivia, Lionel has lost touch with the realities of his own life and is living in dreams, just like the rest of his class as they march towards their own destruction.

It is never safe to pronounce categorically on the moral priorities of a writer or indeed of any artist. Isabel Colegate knows what she believes and it is our job to guess at it. But in the last analysis, it seems to me at least that she praises and believes in honesty above all things. Those characters who are aware of the realities of their own existence enjoy her support, while it is withdrawn, occasionally reluctantly, from the fantasists. Sir Randolph or Ellen, Cicely or Osbert or the tragic poacher turned beater, Tom Harker, are spared the rod because, in their different ways, they are doing their best, trying to hurt no one, trying to see their duty. Gilbert, Aline, even Minnie or Olivia or Lionel are wanting because they do not face reality. With all these characters, their class is immaterial, Colegate appears to be saying, what matters is their self-knowledge, their desire to live a good life, their moral intention. With this doctrine, she holds up a wonderfully undistorting glass to us in our own time as much as to her characters. Because these are the core values that survive any social change or upheaval.

In the end, and at the risk of contradiction, I feel that Isabel Colegate probably reveals her inner beliefs as to why the old system worked in the interchange between Cicely and her admirer, the Hungarian Count Tibor Rakassyi, as they return to the house after Tom Harker’s death:

She continued to walk rather fast in silence. It appeared that she was angry, rather than shocked or distressed as he had anticipated.

‘Come, Cicely,’ he said in expiation. ‘He was only a peasant.’

There was another silence. She gave a long trembling sigh. Then she said softly, ‘Yes, he was only a peasant. But we all knew him, you see.’

Julian Fellowes

It caused a mild scandal at the time, but in most people’s memories it was quite outshone by what succeeded it. You could see it as a drama all played out in a room lit by gas lamps; perhaps with flickering sidelights thrown by a log fire burning brightly at one side of the room, a big Edwardian drawing-room, full of furniture, tables crowded with knick-knacks and framed photographs, people sitting or standing in groups, conversing; and then a fierce electric light thrown back from a room beyond, the next room, into which no one has yet ventured, and this fierce retrospective light through the doorway makes the lamplit room seem shadowy, the flickering flames in the grate pallid, the circles of yellow light round the lamps opaque (a kind of tarnished gold) and the people, well, discernibly people, but people from a long time ago, our parents and grandparents made to seem like beings from a much remoter past, Charlemagne and his knights or the seven sleepers half roused from their thousand year sleep.